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Never Enough Books

As I was pondering the years and my personal experiences as an employee of Lerner Publishing Group, I fondly remembered the motto “Never Enough Books.” An underestimated statement. More books. Lerner’s passion, for all students, at all reading levels. For better than 15 years, I have been a member of the Art Department.As a Graphic Designer on many of Lerner’s nonfiction series, I have not only refreshed my own memories of the fantastic facts that I learned during the curricular years of my life, but also continue to be amazed of how much more there is to learn every single day. We are never too young or too old to learn from the wonderful world of books. Here are just some of the interesting facts I learned while working on the Lightning Bolt series. So, the next time you get together for happy hour with your friends, go ahead and have some fun with these trivia bits.

Fun Facts:

• In 1971, Ray Tomlinson invented e-mail to send messages from his computer to other scientists

• Some wasps have a long tail. It looks like a giant stinger but it is actually for laying eggs. The wasp will lay its eggs inside a caterpillar. Larvas will grow inside and eat the caterpillar.

• A leopard can carry a meal bigger than itself up a tree and hang the food on a branch so no other animal can steal it.

• Scientists have found more than 1,100 different kinds of bats. Some as small as your pinkie finger, others as large as a man.

• Earthworms live all over the world except for Antarctica. Some grow to be 11 feet long!

• A sloth leaves its tree about once a week. It moves to another tree to search for food. They can only “scoot” along the ground on all fours but amazingly can swim very well.

• Coyotes and wolves sometimes mate. Their pups are called coywolves.

• Every year there is a race inside the Empire State building. People run up 1,576 steps to the 86th floor observatory. The record time for reaching the observatory is nine minutes and thirty-three seconds.

• Between July 1st, 2006 and June 30, 2007, the Golden Gate Bridge collected almost $85 million in tolls.

• It takes between two and three weeks to ride a raft from one end of the Grand Canyon to the other.

• The cement that workers used to create the Hoover Dam would be enough to build a highway all the way from the Atlantic Ocean on the East Coast to the Pacific Ocean on the West Coast.

• Redwoods often survive fires and floods. And no insects can kill a redwood. But high winds can take down even the biggest trees.

• And then there’s the endangered purple frog. It lives underground and eats termites! Who knew? So what have you learned lately?